The present invention relates to a check-out system of a self-service type which is utilized in a supermarket and the like and is operated by a purchaser himself, who intends to purchase the desired commercial products, in order to check out the price for the commercial products, and more particularly to a check-out system and a POS system utilizing the same which are capable of reducing the operations performed by a purchaser so that the laber of the purchaser is saved.
In recent years, in a supermarket, a convenience store and the like, a check-out system of a self-service type has been used which is operated by a purchaser himself to check-out the price for purchased commercial products.
Heretofore, as for the check-out systems of this sort, there is known a system which is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,792,018 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,676,343 (Articles 1 and 2). This system is a check-out system wherein the system of interset has an inlet portion into which commercial products, which are to be purchased by a purchaser, are casted, a transport conveyor for transporting the commercial products from the inlet portion to an outlet through an intermediate tunnel area (a maintenance area), and a stocker for bagging the commercial products which have been transported to the outlet, and the purchaser puts the commercial products on the transport conveyor after the purchaser made a commercial product code reader (a scanner), which is provided in the inlet portion, read out the commercial product codes and the like of the commercial products to be purchased, and the commercial products are checked by means for checking commercial products which is provided in the middle of the transport path, e.g., in the tunnel area.
In such a check-out system in which the purchaser registrates the commercial products by self-service, it is necessary to detect and prevent the malfunction, such as double registration and an omission of registration of the commercial products, due to inexperience of the operator (the purchaser), and a unjust operation such as an operation of substituting another commercial product for one commercial product and an operation of running away with the unregistrated commercial product(s).
A method of checking commercial products by the commercial product checking means of the system disclosed in the above-mentioned Articles 1 and 2 includes the steps of measuring, every commercial product, the commercial product characteristics (the commercial product characteristic data) such as weight and size by a unit provided in the tunnel area for measuring commercial product characteristics (a commercial product characteristic sensor) and comparing the characteristic data of the commercial product which is previously registrated every commercial product with the data which is obtained by the actual measurement by the commercial product characteristics measuring unit to check whether or not both the data coincides with each other.
Then, the unjust operation is prevented in such a way that if both the data coincides with each other, the commercial product is transported to the stocker, but if both the data does not coincides with each other, the conveyor is fed backwardly to return the commercial product of interest to the inlet portion.
Incidentally, as auxiliary check means of the above-mentioned commercial product checking means, there has also been proposed means wherein a second commercial product code reader is provided within the tunnel area in order to compare the resultant data with the data relating to the commercial product code which has been read out by the commercial product code reader provided in the inlet portion.
In addition, as a similar system to the above-mentioned system, there is known a system disclosed in JP-A-3-257686 (Article 3). This system is constructed in such a way that the commercial products which are to be purchased are put on a conveyor by a purchaser to transport the commercial products, the commercial product codes of the commercial products, which have been successively transported, are read out in turn by an optical scanning unit, and the weight of the commercial products is checked by a unit for detecting weight.
Further, a POS system is realized now in which such a self check-out system and a POS system of a checker operation type by which a checker as a store clerk performs check-out are mixedly installed.
The prior art disclosed in the above-mentioned Articles 1 and 2 is an effective system in terms of preventing the malfunction and the injustice in the case where instead of the store clerk, the purchaser purchases the desired commercial products and performs the check-out by himself. However, when the purchaser (the operator) intends to purchase the desired commercial products, it is required that after the individual commercial products are applied to the commercial product code reader one by one, they are put on the transport conveyor. Therefore, this operation imposes a burden on the purchaser, and thus, this is troublesome, takes time and may result in the malfunction being caused.
On the other hand, in the prior art disclosed in the above-mentioned Article 3, the registration of the commercial products is performed on the basis of the simple operation of doing nothing but placement of the commercial products on the conveyor. However, some commercial products may readily fall down or may crease easily. Therefore, as compared with the case where the commercial product codes are read out by the manual operation, the commercial products the commercial product codes of which can not be read out may be easy to be found out.
In the above-mentioned Article 3, it is proposed that for the commercial products the commercial product codes of which could not be read out, the commercial product codes thereof are input by the store clerk. However, since the labor of the store clerk is required, the advantage of reducing the man power in the store is necessarily decreased.
In addition, the above-mentioned prior art has the following problems associated therewith.
(1) There may occur the case where after once the commercial product code has been input, the purchase of the associated commercial product is wanted to be cancelled. However, it is not taken into consideration at all that after the commercial product of interest has been put on the convey unit, the registration of the commercial product of interest is cancelled.
(2) Since the operation for preparing the commercial product characteristic data of the check-out system takes a lot of time, the check-out system can not be used until the commercial product characteristic data is prepared.
(3) If the check is rigidly performed, since even the commercial products each having a small measurement error is caught in the check and thus the reoperation is required, it takes a lot of time. Therefore, the operation efficiency is reduced, and this results in congestion. On the other hand, if the check is mitigated, the check accuracy for the high price commercial product for which the sufficient check is required will be necessary the same as that for the cheep commercial product.
(4) For the purpose of preventing the injustice, the monitoring is performed by utilizing the monitoring camera. However, if the number of monitoring cameras is large, the possibility that such injustice is missed is increased.
Further, in the POS system in which such a self check-out system is combined with the POS system of a checker operation type, since the check-out system is available for reducing the man power in the store, there is the advantage to be utilized on the part of the store. However, on the part of the purchasers, as compared with the POS system of a checker operation type, the more troublesome operation called the check-out needs to be performed by the purchasers themselves. Therefore, there is also a problem that although the POS system of a self check-out type is introduced, the self check-out system is not used by the purchasers. Rather, finally the purchasers concentrate on the POS system of a checker operation type, and as a result, the operational efficiency of the whole POS system is reduced.